by Yonah Jeremy Bob
According to the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, the decision followed a comprehensive review of the evidence, legal considerations, and procedural circumstances surrounding the case.
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The IDF Military Advocate General Maj. Gen. Itay Offir on Thursday announced that he has ordered the cancellation of the indictment against five defendants in the Sde Teiman case.
Offir explained that the evidentiary difficulties in the case, combined with the scandal surrounding the leaked video, led to the former prosecutorial team itself being probed, making it too difficult to continue the case.
The case has been the most controversial alleged war crimes case to come out of the war to date, with many Israelis slamming the IDF prosecution for going after the soldiers and many lawyers and critics of Israel blasting the prosecution for moving too slowly on the case, and now closing it.
External major elements to the case include that much of the government had turned against the Israeli legal establishment over a range of issues by the time the indictment was filed, and that much of the world was up in arms over alleged torture at Sde Teiman as early as fall 2023, with little action by Israeli officials to address those criticism until the Israeli Supreme Court ordered Sde Teiman closed in mid-2024.
The case was filed by Offir's predecessor, Yifat Tomer Yerushalmi, in February 2025 against five soldiers for the alleged crimes.
Yerushalmi resigned in October 2025 over her illegal leaking of a video of the alleged beating prior to trial, where it could have been legally and publicly presented. Offir replaced her a month later.
From a domestic political perspective, for the current government, the safest move was always to tank the Sde Teiman case.
He did not call the case a "blood libel," as some coalition politicians have done, but simply closed it for technical reasons, which he blamed on his predecessor.
The technical problems were real and many: Tomer Yerushalmi leaked a video of the five defendants allegedly beating the detainee, harming some of their fair trial rights, the lead prosecutor for the case Lt. Col. Lior Ayash is one of the officials under a criminal probe which disrupted the progress and management of the case, and the government decided to release the Palestinian detainee who was beaten back to Gaza without having testified in court.
No official has ever explained the rationale for why the Palestinian detainee was released without taking pre-trial testimony, a recognized procedure for special circumstances, which was famously used against former prime minister Ehud Olmert in the Talansky Affair.
The IDF statement announcing the decision made it clear that IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir was ready to support Offir in whichever direction he ultimately decided to go.
But closing the case may be problematic not only for Offir's standing within Israel's legal community, but also before the International Criminal Court.
All of the technical issues above are real, but all of them can also be overcome, and to close the case, Offir has to sidestep the medical report, which appears far more damning against the five soldiers than the widely discussed video.
The soldiers are not outright denying they fought the detainee
The five IDF soldiers, broadly speaking, do not deny that they had a physical altercation with the detainee.
Mostly, they claim self-defense and that they had to get him under control.
But the medical report reveals seven of his ribs were broken and that an object was either shoved up his anus or that his butt was stabbed with an object.
These do not seem like actions consistent with merely getting control over one detainee in self-defense.
Offir said that the medical report was significant evidence, but would have failed to get a conviction at trial without more corroborating evidence, especially given the absence of the victim to testify.
The much-defamed video was not doctored. It, in fact, seems to show IDF soldiers beating the detainee. It is just that it was edited to shorten it from many hours of footage where nothing happened, to the moments when the more critical events occurred.
However, Offir noted that much of the activities and alleged beatings was set in a spot where seeing who exactly did what was obscured in the footage.
Still, ignoring all of the above evidence could permanently harm his standing within the Israeli legal community and make it harder for him to manage the IDF legal division, or the legal community may be so on its back heels right now from a variety of other crises that it might not have wanted to spend energy fighting on this issue.
To date, Offir has received high marks from many IDF legal officials who remained in their posts between his and Tomer-Yerushalmi's tenures.
The ICC will likely reject Israeli explanations that it had taken the beating issue seriously, but that a strange series of events, including Tomer Yerushalmi's personal meltdown, had simply unwound the case on technical grounds.
But many Israeli legal officials are more doubtful at this stage about getting any fair hearing before the ICC.
Yonah Jeremy Bob
Source: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-889768
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